Americans must not put a maverick in White House

DONALD TRUMP must not win the American presidential election. The United States owes this much to the rest of the world -- and, indeed, to itself.

The stakes are unnervingly high in this election. The US is faced with an existential choice between the best and the worst in its chequered contemporary history. The choice is not between Republican and Democratic America. The choice is between America as it, and a new America in a darker world.

Today's America has its faults. Yet, it represents the ability of fallible humans to fashion a workable and working domestic and international system. In it, the economic energies released by free trade create new political and social possibilities. Ever since the end of World War II, which brought down German Nazism; and particularly since the end of the Cold War, which deposited Soviet communism in the dustbin of world history, global democracy, led by America, has won for itself  the right to set the overall direction of global affairs.

There have been missteps along the way. The invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of the Libyan regime were meant to make the Middle East safe for democracy. Instead, they unleashed the forces of religious terrorism, which found a ready home in Iraq. Syria is another country in which the Americans appear to be intent on bringing about regime change, no matter what the consequences are.

However, it also is American internationalism that has produced the long Asian peace since the end of the Vietnam War. South-east Asian countries did not fall like dominoes to militantly expansive communism.

Instead, China abjured its failed experiment with that faith to join the world of the economically free.

Today, even formerly-communist Vietnam is closer to the United States than it is to China. The benefits of economic liberalisation are so clear to countries that only North Korea is a recalcitrant holdout.

LITTLE AMERICA

American leadership created the world in which we live.
Mr Trump does not fit into that world.

He is protectionist: he has threatened America's trading partners with trade tariffs that would destroy their relations with it. He is a strategic dissolute who could live with its Asian allies going nuclear to protect themselves, unless they pay America for that protection.

He would abrogate the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade pact that has clear strategic goals as well, particularly in Asia.

Since powerful countries seek to create, or to recreate, the world in their own image, their self-imagery is extremely important.

Mr Trump's envisaged United States would be a Little America. It would be petty and petulant. It would be jealous of intellectual diversity. It would be distrustful of ethnic outsiders, beginning with Mexicans and Muslims. Even long-established citizens such as blacks and Hispanics would be put in their racial place (one determined by white men like him, of course).

Economically, America would be a country where businessmen would display their patriotism by avoiding taxes legally! In terms of gender, it also would be the groping capital of the world.

That is Mr Trump's America. That this man should vie convincingly for its presidency indicts its political system. Should he win, the hollowing out of American values within would take with it America's leadership in a civilised world.

It is no wonder then that Russia and China, the main challengers of American power and influence in Europe and Asia, appear to be hoping for a Trump victory. Americans lured by his nationalist hyperbole should ask themselves whether this is is not a curious fact, to say the least.

A readiness to ask hard questions, and a refusal to settle for easy answers, is the first requirement of intelligent democratic politics.

Americans, who pride themselves rightly on the democratic vibrancy of their politics, should ask themselves such questions. Polling day must not subvert the basis of the very democracy which it is meant to uphold.

CLINTON’S AMERICA

Ms Hillary Clinton is no saint. Goaded on perhaps by Mr Trump's parochialism, she has vowed to renegotiate the TPP. This borders on political opportunism. She is a part of the Democratic dispensation that visualised the pact, although she did not hold executive office when it was brought into being.

Also, as her continuing problems with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reveal, she could have been more circumspect in how to use e-mail during her tenure as Secretary of State. However, there is no proof that her misjudgement, if any, compromised national security.

Nor is she implicated in her husband's sexual indiscretions, embarrassing as they are. If anything, even those excesses pale in comparison with the exploits of Mr Trump.

A Clinton victory would declare to the rest of the world that America's women, its racial and other minorities, its liberal intelligentsia, and its forward-looking generations are not ready to hand their country over to a populist masquerading as a leader.

A Clinton presidency would mean that America's global allies and partners can continue to depend on the political sanity of the most powerful nation on earth.
For Ms Clinton to win, it is essential for every American to cast her or his vote.

Nothing could be more disastrous than to believe that she will win in any case.

The shock Brexit vote was caused by those who believed that the Remain camp would win in any case. Hence, they stayed away from the booth. The Leave camp turned up in full force -- and the die was cast.

This scenario must not be played out in America. The FBI investigations, which have clouded her prospects, would serve an unintended but useful purpose if they roused Ms Clinton's sleeping sympathisers from their apathy.

Americans must not trust the majority to be mature enough to keep a maverick out of the White House. The truth is that the majority is never known before election day itself.

Responsible Americans must prove to be that majority on election day this year.